The release of the Ventoy 1.1.0 tool has been announced, designed to create bootable USB drives that include multiple operating systems. The program allows you to boot OS from unchanged ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, and EFI images without the need to unpack the image or reformat the drive. You simply need to copy the desired set of ISO images to the USB Flash with the Ventoy bootloader, and it will enable the loading of the operating systems contained within those images. At any time, you can replace or add new ISO images just by copying new files, which is convenient for testing and previewing various distributions and operating systems. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
Ventoy supports booting on systems with BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI, UEFI Secure Boot, and MIPS64EL UEFI with MBR or GPT partition tables. It supports various versions of Windows, WinPE, Linux, BSD, ChromeOS, and images from Vmware and Xen. The developers have tested Ventoy with over 1200 ISO images, including various versions of Windows and Windows Server, several hundred Linux distributions, and more than a dozen BSD systems (FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, pfSense, FreeNAS, etc.). of virtual machines In addition to USB drives, the Ventoy bootloader can be installed on local disks, SSDs, NVMe, SD cards, and other types of storage devices that use FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, UDF, XFS, or Ext2/3/4 file systems. There is a mode for automated OS installation into a single file on a portable medium with the ability to add your own files to the created environment (for example, to create images with Windows or Linux distributions that do not support Live mode).
In the new version, the number of supported ISO images has exceeded 1200. Support for the ISO images of the eweOS distribution has been added (which uses dinit, musl, busybox, clang, pacman, and wayland). Issues with loading SystemRescue 11.02+ have been resolved. The Shim boot layer has been updated (solving the issue with SBAT data verification). The iVentoy project is also being developed, providing a PXE server with capabilities similar to Ventoy (the difference is in booting systems over the network instead of from a local drive).
Notes by Theodore Ts'o on the Linux kernel, code of conduct, ext4, btrfs, and ZFS.
Source: opennet.ru
